Last week, a federal appeals court upheld a law that would force the sale of popular social platform TikTok in order for it to remain operational in the United States. Beijing-based parent company ByteDance is vowing to fight on with a petition for a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court. The law, passed in April, invokes existing federal code that prohibits access to sensitive material by adversarial foreign nations of which China (along with Russia, Iran and North Korea) is one. Barring further court action, ByteDance will have to sell TikTok by January 19 or face bans at app stores.

A three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the arguments by ByteDance and TikTok that the April law violates the First Amendment and should be overturned.

The decision states that “the law is “carefully crafted to deal with only control by a foreign adversary” and does not infringe the First Amendment right to free speech. “The government acted solely to protect that freedom from a foreign adversary nation and to limit that adversary’s ability to gather data on people in the United States.”

“The Supreme Court has an established historical record of protecting Americans’ right to free speech, and we expect they will do just that on this important constitutional issue,” TikTok wrote in a newsroom post reacting to the decision. “Unfortunately, the TikTok ban was conceived and pushed through based upon inaccurate, flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”

Since the Supreme Court hears cases at its discretion, ByteDance’s ability to be heard there is not guaranteed, though the case, affecting what the Chinese company says are 170 million U.S. subscribers, is high-profile enough to have a good chance at certiorari.

The court’s affirmation that Congress is empowered to act to protect U.S. interests “relied heavily on warnings from U.S. officials that the Chinese government can exert its will on … ByteDance, potentially giving it the ability to access U.S. users’ data and manipulate what they see on the platform,” writes The Wall Street Journal.

The judges “also noted that apps like Facebook and YouTube are banned in China and that the country does not allow TikTok there,” The New York Times points out, underscoring the U.S. government’s concerns that “the Chinese government’s oversight of private companies would allow it to use the app to retrieve sensitive information about Americans or to spread propaganda, though they have not publicly shared evidence that this has occurred.”

Related:
TikTok Asks Court to Temporarily Freeze Sale-or-Ban Law, The New York Times, 12/9/24